Filed under: Randomness and Intentionality
“God’s Appointment Book for July 10, 2011″
Late last Spring, I set up this 19 x 10 grid of 2″ squares and chose a red color target for the left of the grid and a blue target for the right half of the grid, then spattered primary colors using random numbers to open and close the cells of the grid as usual. After a lot of rounds of spattering, the colors began to define themselves. Then I reset the numbers to grade the colors horizontally—blurring the distinction between the halves. So they’re still two distinct colors, but the border between them is in the process of becoming more indistinct.
This painting got finished just in time to be a present for my middle daughter and her new husband for their wedding this July.
“Pattern and Dispersion for November 4, 2010″
When I was at Vermont Studio Center in October-November 2010, it was a great opportunity to work on a backlog of ideas I’d accumulated in my sketchbooks. I had been pondering the idea of setting up a grid and progressively disrupting the pattern somehow. So I bought a bunch of boxes of Froot Loops cereal at the dollar store and set them out in a grid (2976 of them, actually) on canvas. It took a while.
When they were all neatly arranged, I spattered blue, then hit the center with compressed air to mess them up, then spattered red. Here’s how it looked at that point:
Yellow and black disturbances and spatterings followed.
My goal was to explore the idea of context and disturbance. Pattern and dispersion. Intention and accident. We create ordered systems of context to orient ourselves every day. For instance, consider what we do with time. We’re immersed in an amorphous flow of past, present, future— so we divide the time stream into years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, to give us a point of reference, a way to make sense of where we are in the stream. But events happen independently from the gridwork we overlay onto time. The car battery dies (to take a recent example) and this event disturbs the careful meshwork arranged for the day. These disruptions often become the main subject matter for the day. Likewise in this painting, the disturbance seems to become what the image is about, not the grid.
During the Monadnock Art Tour, a lot of visitors responded to this painting saying it reminded them of a map. Perfect! What’s a map but our effort to take something huge and organic and overlay a gridwork (latitude and longitude) to provide context, to orient ourselves in the vastness?
A friend in Maine puts away all clocks and watches when he and his wife are on vacation. They eat when they’re hungry, sleep when they are tired, get up when they feel rested. He says it refreshes their brains, bodies and spirits to live outside the gridwork of time for a while. He warns it does take a few days to get back to “normal.”
Filed under: Randomness and Intentionality
I was honored this month to be asked to have two of my paintings be part of the worship experience at my home church, Trinity Evangelical Church in Peterborough NH!
I chose two from my “God’s Appointment Book” series, where a perfect/imperfect circle is striving to emerge from the context of chaos and randomness. It’s an encouragement to me to ponder how God, though absolutely perfect, doesn’t seem to mind doing his creating with imperfect tools in a context of brokenness. Thanks to Pastor John Engle and Minister of Music Chuck Clark for the opportunity to share.
“Occurrence for October 13, 2011″
It was a nice overcast day yesterday morning (before the rain started), so I took advantage of the diffused light to photograph some recent work. In the series I call “Occurrences” I set up a grid of circles but let the grid decay in some way. I put my trusty wooden gridwork (see its construction story here) over the surface and randomly dump in ping pong balls. I lift off the grid and some balls stay put and others wander. Between layers of spatters, I replace some and remove others. The result is a grid that’s not really a grid. In “Occurrence for October 13, 2011″ above, the grid appears and fades in the yellow and pink and blue swirls.
How much order do we need to see a pattern? When does the grid cease to be a grid? At the bottom edge, the paint barely delineates the circles, and at the top the circles wander to the point of not really being a pattern. How much order is necessary for us to make sense of our lives? Too much order and we’re bored. Too much variety and we’re disoriented. Maybe you’ve heard the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
And when the pattern is decayed, what clues remain of the original system? Knowing the backstory helps, doesn’t it? Telling how I did the wooden-grid-overlay bit makes the image—and the reason for the encroaching chaos—more understandable, yes? I’m fascinated by the idea in Genesis of a world that was created perfect but then suffered a disruption, a breakup. Perfection decayed. Order disordered. I find it makes an interesting backdrop for pondering the world around me—which daily proves to be a shifting mix of gorgeous and goshawful. What clues remain of the original plan? Does knowing the backstory help with detecting the pattern?
“God’s Appointment Book for August 8, 2010″
(In this painting, a color target of 50 blue, 20 red, 80 yellow, 30 black grades into a target of 30 blue, 80 red, 20 yellow, 50 black)
“God’s Appointment Book for August 9, 2010″
(In this one, 80 20 50 30 grades into a target of 30 50 20 80)
Relinquishing control is hard to do. Whether it’s giving your teenager the keys to the car or pondering how to do business with a Supreme Being in the mix, it takes some head-scratching.
Working with random numbers is an exercise in letting go. With my painting method (you old-timers know this in your sleep, newbies can click “About My Process” for more), I open up a certain percentage of the grid randomly to expose it to a spattering of a primary color. My target color for the left side of the painting at the top was 50 blue, 20 red, 80 yellow, 30 black. That means when it’s time to spatter yellow, I get a set of random numbers 1-10 from random.org, and any time the number comes up 8 or less, I remove a square and open that part of the grid to the rain of yellow paint.
This means a lot of the grid needs to be open for the 80% yellow to happen, right? But random numbers do what they want. So I’ll get a sequence like “10, 9, 10, 10, 5, 10, 3, 10, 9 , 9, 9, 9 …” No kidding. Grrr! 20% of the grid’s getting exposed, not 80. It’s not coming out the way I’ve planned. Panic? Cheat? I feel like it sometimes. This is what random numbers do when you let them loose. (see http://www.random.org/analysis/ for an article on this, including Dilbert’s take.)
But, random numbers have another property: they average out. Guaranteed. Over time, 80% of the numbers will be 8 or less. I can be assured that the next time I do the yellow part of the grid, the numbers will push back toward exposing 80% of the grid to yellow. I’ll bet I will even get some sequences like “5, 3, 6, 2, 2, 7, 8, 1, 5,…” when NO occurrences of 10 or 9 will come up. Probability is a bulldozer. If you set it up for 80%, even though the current numbers are not looking good, it WILL come out 80%.
Are you still with me? Come on! This stuff is fascinating! Buckle up for the philosophical/theological-pondering part of our day:
If God is perfect and omnipotent, how can he abide the current system of stuff going on that is so chaotic, evil, and generally not apparently what his plan should allow? In other words, it looks like he wants 80%, but a quick scan around the globe looks like it’s currently coming up a LOT of nines and tens! But if 80% is the plan, 80% will happen. Randomness IS a chaos – you never know what will happen next. But probability IS a bulldozer. It WILL achieve 80 percentness, heck or high water.
A life of faith means betting on the bulldozer.
“God’s Appointment Book for November 17, 2010″
How “guided” can we claim to be in this life? If there’s a Higher Power or a Supreme Being or a Force, how involved can I expect him (her, it) to be in my everyday life? Omnipotence carries a lot of freight. “All Powerful” means all the knobs are at 11. Nothing goes on without a signature from the front office. But wait a minute: it sure seems like I can stop for a sip of coffee right now (Ewww. It’s cold) or put my feet up on the desk (Oof. Hard to type).
I have friends who feel that God helps them choose what socks they wear each day, and friends who believe that God —if there is one— has no say-so whatever in their daily life. Most of us fall somewhere between the socks and the cynicism. But where?
In this painting, I chose to use the proportion of the floor plan that God gave Moses in telling him how to build the Tabernacle, which was a portable tent/temple the Jews used for years. Interesting, that the Ruler o’ the Universe would get so specific—I mean, building plans? But wait! There’s more! There are specs for furniture and tools, recipes for oils and incenses, even specific artists and artisans God drafts for the project. Check it out— it begins in Exodus 25. But get this: The artisans had to make two angels on the top of the ark, but they could make them whatever kind of angels they wanted, I assume: beefy or slim, buff or dumpy, guy or girl. Baroque or Mannerist, Expressionist or Art Deco (my vote). Or whatever style was hip in the Middle East desert in B.C. This got me thinking: specific instructions, but not direct guidance. God’s omnipotent, but not into micromanagement?
So I set up three areas on the canvas to correspond with the outer court, the holy place, and the holy of holies (where God’s presence was supposed to hover over the ark of the covenant). I chose three different color formulas for each area, and removed a random percentage of the masking squares according to each area’s formula, and spattered primary colors. (Check out “About my process” if I’ve lost you.)
So I was directed by the voice of God, right? By swiping the proportions he dictated to Moses, plus by subjecting my color choices to randomness—throwing the decision into his lap, so to speak. But wait a minute—I thought the whole thing up, didn’t I? Did God turn from the big screen, chuckle indulgently and point the remote my way? Why? Why not? Would I have worn that color socks anyhow?
One of the balances that gets me going is when you make something concrete in order to make something ephemeral. A poem doesn’t really happen unless it encounters a pen and paper, or computer and printer, or voice and listener, right? Unless an idea becomes concrete somehow, does it exist at all? Nah— not really.
So when I do my art, I make concrete, hard edged, 3-d fixtures that end up being the thing that ‘makes’ the spattered, nuanced 2-d images appear on canvas. One fixture I’ve been using for a while is a 48″x48″ wooden grid with 2″x2″ cells and 3/8″ dividers. I lay this grid over a surface, and with a set of 361 2″x2″ wooden blocks, I can open or close the cells of the grid to allow them to get spattered or not. I can also dump items onto the grid, let gravity and chance sort them out, and let them act as masks for the spatters. (You can see a painting made with this process in my entry for January 9, 2010, “Circular Logic..”)
But! Problem: My grid’s tied up in the middle of a painting I’ve had building for over a month. It’s coming along nicely, thanks, but still needing more layers. I wanted to use the grid on another piece, so what to do? Since you can’t go to Conceptual Depot and buy this stuff, ya gotta make it. So, I spent a day in my shop last weekend building another 19×19-cell grid. The challenge is to make the 3/8″ wood strips interlock perfectly so the cells are a consistent 2-and-1/16″ square. I used a tablesaw and dado blade to make my last one, and it took some fussing to get them to fit, so I decided to try a router with 3/8″ bit this time. Below are shots from the process. First, I had to make a fence for the router so I could cut 3/8″ grooves exactly 2 and 1/16″ apart across a bunch of 1 x 6s. Here it is, screwed to the base of the router with a straight edge and the router bit coming through the bottom.
Halfway through plowing grooves in the boards.
I then cut the boards into 3/8″ strips, slapped them on the floor….
…. and hey! they interlocked perfectly.
So, this piece of carpentry is going to be making paintings soon. How much can the fixture dictate the work, though? This grid’s just an elaborated paintbrush, really– just another way to control how and where paint hits canvas. But when the cells are controlled by random numbers, something besides me is dictating the image. How much of a life of its own can a work of art have before it becomes something separate altogether?
God’s Appointment Book for 11.27.2009
Here’s a painting I did using the “golden rectangle” built on the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence starts with 1 and adds to it the preceding number, i.e.: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 etc. If you make a rectangle with these proportions, (13 x 21, say) it’s a “golden rectangle”. You can snip a square off the end of the rectangle and what remains is another golden rectangle. Snip another square, and a golden rectangle still remains.
I chose a different target color for each square, each square using a 2,3,5,8 color proportion (30 cyan, 80 red, 20 yellow, 50 black, is the target for the largest 13 x 13 square on the left. Upper right is 50,20,80,30; lower right is 80,30,20,50). Each color was subjected to a random number sequence, i.e. to get 50% red, 50% of the masking squares were removed randomly.
The pattern eventually spirals down to the white square in the lower right.
Each block displays a distinct color identity, even though the code for each color is sifted through randomness. The smaller blocks (the 3 x 3- and 2 x 2- block units in the lower middle don’t have enough data variety to paint their true ‘identities’. It looks like the blue 5 x 5 block is as small as I can get and still have enough cells to display the range that the randomness inflicts.
Here’s a diagram of the color targets for the painting. It’s interesting to me to see how the randomness fragments these targets, yet their color identity still comes through.
“God’s Appointment Book for 4.2.2010″
Why do some people seem to open themselves to input from God, and others don’t? The same event—say, poverty—forges one person’s character for the good, and absolutely crushes another. And if God is in control of not only the events, but receptivity of the receiver as well, how does this happen?
Matt. 5:45 says, “…He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” And at the same time Romans 9:18 says, “So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.” But apparently we’re held accountable for our response to him, because Hebrews 3:15 says, “… “Today if you hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts…”
On this painting, I set up the grid, removed a random 1/3 of the blocks, and spattered repeated layers to create a ‘target color’ for that third. I covered that third and exposed one of the remaining thirds, spattered another target color, and did the same for the last 1/3 of the squares. So, there were three color mixes, randomly distributed through the grid.
Next I subjected the entire grid to a 50% exposure to a multiple series of random spatterings. It fascinated me to see how the three color mixes responded to the same color events. Some spatterings made drastic, tone-altering shifts on some squares, while the same spatter didn’t impact some other squares at all. Red droplets falling on red squares didn’t do much, but they dramatically shifted the dark blue squares.
It made me ponder the idea of God’s ‘common grace’. To what degree are his blessings are available to all? To what degree does my own makeup make me impervious? To what degree does he open or close the possibilities?
Filed under: Control and Chaos, Randomness and Intentionality, The Whole Blog
“God’s Appointment Book for 3/8/10″
If there is a Force influencing my life as I experience it, how does it work?
In this painting I took a chaotic event (pouring ping pong balls onto a carefully-leveled panel) and spattered a layer of primary color each time. As the layers built up, and colored circle shadows began to emerge, I began to shift the locations of some of the balls, to fiddle with the randomness a bit to achieve a goal: for an orange circle to emerge from the chaos. Because I was starting with an event I couldn’t control, I knew the result would be hampered (or is it enhanced?) by the chaos of the balls’ locations. With each layer of paint I looked for which areas were tending toward the pattern I envisioned, and nudged a few of these units toward my goal. I limited how many spots of color I could influence each layer, and stayed within the pattern the painting had chosen for itself. Very gradually, my ‘will’ for the painting began to emerge, but not perfectly, not without deviation.
Part of the challenge (and sometimes frustration) I have had in trying to live more spiritually alive is the apparent respect God seems to have for my will, and the subtlety he employs to nudge his ideas and purposes into my life. If you’re omnipotent, why not push harder? Why not just dominate and get it done perfectly? Why, this all-powerful one even allows people to ignore and reject him!
I understand why God is often called ‘father,’ because I can see the same dynamics at work in my own parenting. When my daughters struggle with a challenge, I’m often tempted to be heavy-handed and thunder down the ‘right way’ to do things. To state the Obvious Solution. To Make It Happen. But would this help my kids become confident, mature adults? TO decide and choose according to their own personality?
As I worked on this painting I felt more of how God is always conscious of our particular bents, and works subtly and respectfully to bring his patterns and colors about.
